A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Tag: obama

Mr. Obama is fast becoming the past, not the future, for donors, activists and Democratic strategists. Party leaders are increasingly turning toward Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as Democrats face difficult races this fall in states where the president is especially unpopular, and her aides are making plain that she has no intention of running for “Obama’s third term.”

Which put me in mind of this statement famously attributed to another woman who had “the heart and stomach of a king” and the will to rule, Queen Elizabeth I:

I know the inconstancy of the English people, how they ever mislike the present government and have their eyes fixed upon that person who is next to succeed. More people adore the rising sun than the setting sun.

Which is why Elizabeth never designated a successor. Every incumbent president probably wishes he had that power.

Last week, President Obama hosted the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, D.C. He welcomed over 40 African heads of state and their outsized entourages to what was a festive affair. Indeed, even the Ebola virus in West Africa failed to dampen spirits in the nation’s capital. Perhaps it was the billions of dollars in African investment, announced by America’s great private companies, that was so uplifting.

Good cheer was also observed in the advertising departments of major newspapers. Yes, many of the guest countries paid for lengthy advertisements–page turners–in the newspapers of record. That said, the substantive coverage of this gathering was thin. Neither the good, the bad, nor the ugly, received much ink.

What about the good? Private business creates prosperity, and prosperity is literally good for your health. My friend, the late Peter T. Bauer, documented the benefits of private trade in his classic 1954 book West African Trade. In many subsequent studies, Lord Bauer refuted conventional wisdom with detailed case studies and sharp economic reasoning. He concluded that the only precondition for private trade and prosperity to flourish was individual freedom reinforced by security for person and property.

More recently, Ann Bernstein, a South African, makes clear that the establishment and operation of private businesses does a lot of economic good (see: The Case for Business in Developing Countries, 2010). Yes, businesses create jobs, supply goods and services, spread knowledge, pay taxes, and so forth. Alas, in the Leaders Summit reportage that covered the multi-billion dollar investments by the likes of Coca-Cola, General Electric, and Ford Motor Co., the benefits of the humdrum activity of business and trade were nowhere to be found. But, as they say, “that’s not the president’s thing.”

Let’s move from the good to the bad and the ugly, and focus on the profound misery in Sub-Saharan Africa. I measure misery with a misery index. It is the simple sum of inflation, unemployment, and the bank lending interest rate, minus year on year GDP per capita growth. Using this metric, the countries for Sub-Saharan Africa are ranked in the accompanying table for 2012.

Everything that American troops have done in Iraq, all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering — all of it has led to this moment of success. Now, Iraq is not a perfect place. It has many challenges ahead. But we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.

Yes, that was President Obama at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on December 14, 2011.

Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many.

In case there’s any doubt – he means President Obama, not the president who launched the war that cost 4,487 American soldiers’ lives, 32,000 Americans wounded, some 100,000 to 500,000 Iraqi deaths, and as much as $6 trillion.

Maybe they should have listened to the Cato Institute back in 2001 and 2002.

President Obama will likely take some executive action this fall to reduce deportations or legalize some unauthorized immigrants. He recently ordered Jeh Johnson, Secretary of Homeland Security, to delay the release of a review of current deportation policy until after the summer.

A White House official revealed the reason for the delay: “[President Obama] believes there’s a window for the House to get immigration reform done this summer, and he asked the secretary to continue working on his review until that window has passed.”

President Obama has taken a much more conciliatory tone toward Republicans in his push for immigration reform. His 2014 State of the Union address asked Republicans to support reform without blaming them for obstructing it. The White House official’s statement that Obama will delay executive action until after the summer is consistent with that bipartisan tone. It also allows President Obama to appear to be working with Republicans on reform while leaving his policy options open prior to the 2014 elections.

There is no doubt that President Obama’s attitude is better than blaming Republicans for all immigration problems and is more likely to motivate House Republicans to pass some kind of reform, but the mere mention of executive action only deepens the distrust that many Republicans have for the president – not to mention the manylegal issues it raises. Republicans are justifiably concerned that President Obama may not enforce any immigration law that is passed or may change it with executive actions.

The Obama administration has consistently piled on more complex rules and regulations for the H-2A, H-2B, and H-1B work visas (with some exceptions that will actually liberalize the system) that make the legal migration system difficult to use. A new guest worker visa program created by Congress could be similarly stymied by rules and regulations promulgated by executive agencies. Some Republicans also complain about the president’s deportationpolicy. These are real concerns that are not mitigated by the president’s threats.

Many of President Obama’s adjustments to immigration enforcement have been disappointing and haven’t legalized as many unlawful immigrants as they could have. The president’s record on enforcing our harsh immigration laws is strict in contrast to his rhetoric and the stated goals of his executive actions.

However, only legislation can create a guest worker visa program and expand legal immigration enough to channel future immigrants into the legal market. Whatever executive actions the president decides to take, they will deal with problems that have emerged due to our restrictive immigration system that makes it virtually impossible for low and mid-skilled workers to immigrate. Expanding the scale and scope of immigration while diminishing the intensive regulatory oversight role of the federal government is a long-term solution in contrast to an executive action that is temporary at worst and at best seeds legal uncertainty.

Two years ago, there was a flurry of excitement because MarketWatch journalist Rex Nutting crunched annual budget numbers and proclaimed that Barack Obama was the most fiscally conservative president since at least 1980.

I looked at the data and found a few mistakes, such as a failure to adjust the numbers for inflation, but Nutting’s overall premise was reasonably accurate.

As you can see from the tables I prepared back in 2012, Obama was the third most frugal president based on the growth of total inflation-adjusted spending.

And he was in first place if you looked at primary spending, which is total spending after removing net interest payments (a reasonable step since presidents can’t really be blamed for interest payments on the debt accrued by their predecessors).

So does this mean Obama is a closet conservative, as my old—but misguided—buddy Bruce Bartlett asserted?

This is a difficult question to answer. As Matt Graham at the Bipartisan Policy Center has pointed out, the rate of internal removals as a percentage of all Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) removals has declined during the Obama Presidency. But this, in and of itself, doesn’t tell us much about the long run trends of internal enforcement. We need data from the past that we can compare President Obama’s immigration enforcement record to. We only have the rate of internal deportations for the last year of the Bush Administration. Cato has filed a FOIA to find out if the government kept statistics on internal versus border removals prior to 2008 but I’ve heard the data wasn’t kept.

Let’s assume that 63.6 percent of all ICE removals were internal from 2001 to 2007. I chose 63.6 percent because that was ICE’s internal removal rates in the year 2008 – the first year when that statistic is available. That means that the number of internal removals under the Bush administration was about 1.25 million. From 2009-2013, the Obama administration’s has removed just over 1 million from the interior of the United States. Of course, Bush had three more years to deport unauthorized immigrants. 660,000 people were removed from the interior of the United States during the first five years of the Bush administration.

Source: Department of Homeland Security, BPC, Author’s Calculations.

President Bush removed an average of about 250,000 unauthorized immigrants a year, an average of 160,000 of them annually were interior removals. President Obama has removed an average of 390,000 unauthorized immigrants a year, an average of 200,000 of them annually were interior removals.

Source: Department of Homeland Security, BPS, Author’s Calculations.

As I’ve written before, the best way to measure the intensity of immigration enforcement is to look at the percentage of the unauthorized immigrant population deported in each year.

I focus on the internal removal figures as a percentage of the estimated unauthorized immigrant population and assume that the internal removal rate of 63.6 percent prevailed throughout the Bush administration. If that interior enforcement rate was steady, then the Bush administration deported an average of 1.43 percent of the interior unauthorized immigrant population every year of his presidency. President Obama’s administration has deported an average of 1.75 percent of the interior unauthorized immigrant population every year of his presidency. Even when focusing on interior removals, President Obama is still out-deporting President Bush - so far.

The Obama interior removal statistics certainly show a downward trend – especially in 2012 and 2013. However, the Obama administration has not gutted or radically reduced internal immigration enforcement no matter how you dice the numbers.

It’s become clear over the last few months that something very funny is going on with immigration enforcement statistics (here, here, and here). The data generally show that interior enforcement, what most people commonly think of as “deportations” (but also includes I-9, Secure Communities, and E-Verify), has declined as a percentage of total removals. Many of the removals appear to be unlawful immigrants apprehended by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and then turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for removal – a trend that began in 2012 and accelerated in 2013. That transfer makes it appear as if there was more internal enforcement than there really was. The administration is therefore deporting an increasing number of recent border crossers and a decreasing number of unlawful immigrants apprehended in the interior.

It appears, then, that President Obama’s reputation for severe interior enforcement was earned for 2009, 2010, and 2011 but is somewhat unjustified in 2012 and 2013. The Bipartisan Policy Center has an excellent report on the enormous court backlogs and other issues that have arisen due to interior immigration enforcement. I’m waiting for additional information from a FOIA request before wading into the data surrounding the interior versus border removals controversy because we do not have data on internal enforcement numbers prior to 2008.

Interior enforcement is only part of the government’s immigration enforcement strategy and must also be looked at as a component of broader immigration enforcement that includes border enforcement.